Danny Phantom: The Written Version
by kineticallyanywhere
Summary: Danny Fenton was 14 when he got a little too curious for his own good. Now, as a half-ghost super hero, he has to do everything he can to, well, keep the world from ending. T for non-punked violence. Complete through Episode 1, Mystery Meat.
1. Prologue

"Smile!"

"Sam, it's a camcorder and this is a video. You don't have to say that. Besides you're making Danny look like an idiot."

"Hey!" Danny let the white hazmat suit he was holding up drop till it dragged on the floor.

"Oh, get over it. This is for 'science'!" Now everyone say your names. I'm Sam Manson, fourteen, and holding the camera." As she said it Sam turned the camera on herself and waved, letting future lovers of teen 'science' everywhere look at her short cropped black hair and goth make-up. She turned the camera on her red-hated friend and let the camera see how horribly his yellow shirt clashed with his dark skin tone. "Your turn."

"Fine." He moved his hands to his hips. "Tucker Foley. Fourteen. Technological genius." Tucker moved his hand to his face to adjust his glasses but the camera was already back on Danny. Behind him was a gaping hole in the wall. Yellow and black striped doors were held open by two blocks to protect the cables that ran out from inside. On top, a red light bulb sat uncovered and unused. The hole was easily the most notable thing in the underground lab where it sat across from rows of tables covered in beakers, gadgets and papers. It was a wonder a room almost as big as a basketball court fit under the city home.

Danny sighed and lifted the suit again. "Danny Fenton. Fourteen. Going to be in deep crap when his parents" - Danny pointed to the picture of his dad's face plastered to the front of the suit - "get home."

"Tuck, catch," Sam tossed the camcorder towards Tucker. Tucker looked like he was about to have a panic attack before he caught it and let out a huge breath.

"Sam, this is the best camera I have!" Tucker readjusted his barete and pointed the camera towards her. "It's the best a Wal-Mart employee discount can buy!'

Sam ignored him and stepped next to Danny. She placed her hands on her hips and looked in at the circuits covering the interior of the hole. "Wow..." she sighed.

"Ok, I showed you the portal, can we get out of here now?" Danny asked his goth friend, but she didn't look toward him. "My parents could be back here any minute. Besides, they say it doesn't work anyway."

"C'mon, Danny, a _ghost zone_! Aren't you curious?" Sam spread her hand out toward the portal. "You gotta check it out!"

Danny bit his bottom lip and seemed to be thinking as he looked at the hole in the wall. His parents had obsessed over the thing for as long as he could remember. They were always dead set upon breaking into the world of ghosts. But ghosts were dead people, right? Breaking into there would be just like breaking into the realm of resting souls. Breaking a hole between life and death...and how cool is that?

"Y'know what...you're right," he told Sam, a smile growing on his face as he gazed into the portal. "Who knows what kind of awesome, super-cool things could lie on the other side of that portal..."

"Well then," Sam turned to Danny and pulled the hazmat, still in his hands, off the ground. "Suit up, Ghost Boy."

Tucker zoomed the camera in on Danny as he slipped the suit on over his white t-shirt and jeans while Sam jogged to the cabinet to get him boots, gloves, and a belt. When Sam came back over, Danny was shoving his hand into the camera lens, and telling Tucker to turn it off already. By the time Danny had strapped the rest of the suit on and zipped it, Sam had thrown the camera battery into a hazardous waste bin.

"Hang on," Sam grabbed the picture of Jack Fenton's face and ripped it off Danny's chest. "you can't go walking around with that on your chest."

"Thanks." Danny brushed off the spot on his chest where the face was, as if to get rid of any bad luck his dad would bring.

Danny ruffled the giant poof of black hair on the top of his head out of nervousness. He spared a glance at the stairs leading back up to the kitchen, almost as if to will someone to come down the stairs. But looking back at the dormant portal the feeling completely evaporated. He _wanted _to see a ghost.

With one last look at his friends - Tucker gave him a reassuring double thumbs up - he took a deep breath and stepped inside the portal.

The inside was surprisingly cold, almost like walking into a refrigerator, but the hazmat suit seemed to block out most of the cold. Looking down at his suit, Danny wondered what the pouches and clips on the belt would be used for when he spotted a cord on the floor between his feet. Following it with his eyes, he traced the cord as it took a sharp right and came all the way across the ceiling, over his head, to where it hooked into a box with two clearly labeled buttons: Off and On.

Only his parents.

Only his parents would forget to turn it on. But could it really be that simple?..._Of course it could, these are my parents_, he thought, lifting his hand.

The last thing he remembered was pushing the button.


	2. Mystery Meat Part I

**A/N**

**I'm just going to put it out there now that while I am going to take direct content from the show, I will be taking liberties here and there to make some aspects 'fuller' or make all around more general sense. I know it's long, but it was either long and quality or short and sucky so I went with quality. Enjoy :)**

**Disclaimer: If I actually owned Danny Phantom, it would look like this. But I don't, so it doesn't, and the world is a darker place.**

* * *

><p><strong>Mystery Meat<strong>

**(Part I)**

Amity Park wasn't small enough to be a town, but it wasn't quite a city either. It was built a bit like a mix between a flat, and much less exciting, San Francisco and Chicago, but the pizza wasn't as good. The buildings were dull and fairly monotonous...except for one. 'Fenton Works' was a brick red building that sat on the corner of Blossom Street and Venkman Avenue. Built onto the top sat, or rather, perched, a huge gray structure that appeared to have been pulled from a Dr. Seus book. The structure was garishly labeled 'Fenton Works' and stuck out like a rottweiler in a field of new born chihuahuas. Inside the home beneath it lived the bane of the town's existence: Jack and Maddie Fenton.

Inside, Maddie was pulling her goggles down over her eyes and clicking on her blowtorch. Across the kitchen table, Jasmine Fenton lifted her book, Surviving Adolescence through Therapy, higher over her face while her brother Danny munched his cereal, head resting on his left hand and a bored expression on his face.

To be totally honest, Danny was dead tired. Ghosts had been doing nothing but flying out of the Fenton Portal ever sice Danny turned it on. Sam had convinced him to stay up all night in front of the stupid thing and throw whatever came out of it back in. He'd slept in front of it every night for the past four weeks before sneaking back up to his bed at six in the morning before Jazz woke up. Nothing too bad had come out of it yet, but Danny wasn't betting on his luck holding out. On one of the first nights, Sam and Tucker had tried to stay over and help but... they kind of got caught.

By his dad.

"So, Danny," he remembered his dad saying after he had sat them all down in spare desk chairs in the lab and walked toward one of the many cluttered counters, "you and your little friends wanna hunt ghosts."

"Uh...actually, Dad?" Danny raised his hand a little and immediately felt stupid for doing so. "I want to be an astronaut."

"Sorry, Mr. Fenton," Sam sat in her chair with her arms and legs crossed. "I _was _into ghosts, but they're so mainstream now. They're like iPods."

"Waste _these_ looks and charisma hunting ghosts?" Tucker gestured to himself. "Criminal."

"Well if you _do_ want to hunt ghosts," Jack went on as if he hadn't heard them (maybe he hadn't), "there are a few things you need to learn."

Danny rolled his eyes behind his dad's back and was about to comment to Sam when his throat got cold. Really cold. He tried to hold back a coughing fit as best as he could, but the crystalline air that shrouded his breath was a dead give away to his friends. He covered his mouth with both hands. He hated the feeling of his ghost sense going off, but not nearly as much as what would follow.

_Oh no_, he thought, panicking a little. _This isn't good._

As Danny was thinking, a red light lit the room and the portal doors opened with a loud buzzer for a final warning as two scraggly, green, floating, octopi swam out. As Danny's dad began monologue, totally unaware to everything, Danny, Sam, and Tucker all stiffened in their chairs. They didn't dare say a word, or else alert Jack to the specters presence. The trio exchanged a look as Jack continued to talk about something along the lines of being prepared. They had all agreed before-hand that they wouldn't call for help from Mr. and Mrs. Fenton. As much as they seemed to know about ghosts, the more time they had spent actually fighting them, the more they realized that his parents had gotten wrong. Sure, they did know some stuff, but the teenagers had come to the conclusion that the two adults would only get themselves killed in a fight. They had not, however, expected either of them to be in the room when a ghost showed up.

While they were trying to think of what to do ("...so will you, whether you wanna be or not...") the octopi spotted them. As Danny watched, their red eyes locked onto his friends and scraggly green tentacles wrapped themselves around them and lifted them from their chairs ("...it all starts with..."). Danny locked eyes with Sam who was obviously holding back a scream. Danny barely had a few seconds to debate his next choice. He could fight and risk his Dad seeing, which isn't as likely as one might think, or he could just sit there and...who was he kidding?

As if the sight of his struggling friends wasn't a dead giveaway.

Danny knew that from Jack's perspective, all was right with the world. "It all starts with your equipment," he was saying. He lifted a gray and green thermos from the counter and turned back to his charges. Sam and Tucker were looking worse for wear, Sam's short pony tail sitting on the top of her head was messed up and Tuckers hat was crooked, but he paid no mind. They must have been like that before and he hadn't noticed. It's not like they had ever left their seats. "Sam, Tucker, this is the Fenton Thermos." Jack shoved the thermos into Sam's shaking hands. "It's supposed to trap ghosts. But, since it doesn't work yet, it's just a thermos..." He sighed, but perked right back up. "A thermos with the word 'Fenton' in front of it!"

Jack turned back around, totally unaware of the gruesome creature that just flew across the room behind him. "And that?" Jack turned toward the portal, now closed on the wall. "That's the Fenton Portal. It releases ghosts into our world whether I want it to or not. Someday," Jack rapped his finger on the yellow and black doors, "I'll figure out how that works, too. Now." Mr. Fenton turned back to the kids to find Sam and Tucker exactly where he left them and his son leaning heavily on Tuckers chair and panting a fair amount. "Who wants to hunt some ghosts?" Jack placed his hand on his hips and thrust out is large (fat) chest and the kids continued their trembling and panting. "You kids, look at 'cha! You're too excited to speak!

"So I'll just go on speaking. I was born many years ago in a log cabin in the woods. I don't exactly remember where but I know I wanted a pony... never got the pony... As a matter of fact we had to eat horse meat - during the war. I had a problem with that..."

That had been about when Danny stopped trying to pay attention through his gasps for air. He had managed to shove the ghosts in without his dad noticing, but he hadn't gotten out unscathed. He twisted his right wrist funny when he tossed the... 'ectopus' across the lab. All he could do was ignore it and try his best not to look like the very air made it sting. If his parents found out he was getting hurt they'd eventually get suspicious, and he couldn't make an excuse for everything. But how long could he hold out? Should he even try to hide it? Maybe they could fix him. If he told them they would understand right? He was still Danny, he was just half... well... dead. Half ghost. Half of the creature that his parents wanted to capture, pick apart, and destroy...

Danny lifted his hand to take a bite out of his cereal, wishing with all of his being that the air itself would quit hurting his wrist when he felt something... _in_ his hand and heard his spoon clatter into his half-empty bowl. Danny's heart skipped a beat and he grabbed his right hand in his left, as if to make sure it was solid again. It was, but for a split second there his hand had been intangible. Untouchable.

Like a ghost.

Why couldn't he control it?

Danny was too focused on being irritated with himself to see his ginger sister raise an eyebrow at her brother. Something was clearly wrong with the boy. She was about to say something when her mom turned the blow torch off and proudly stated, "Ok, two more days and it's done."

"What did you say?" Jack entered the kitchen accompanied by his ever present lingering scent of fudge. "It's done?" He grabbed the strange contraption his wife had been working on off the table and proclaimed to the kitchen ceiling light, "The Fenton Finder is done!" Both kids gave the device strange looks. It had a miniature satellite dish and a red light bulb decorating the face next to two oddly shaped antennae and a green radar screen. The sight of the married couple was strange enough without the crazy contraptions they made. Both wore skin-tight, hazmat jumpsuits, Maddie's blue (which looked good with her lilac eyes but made her own ginger hair stand out) and Jack's orange, just about 24/7. They had even insisted that their children should too. Danny's was white, Jazz's was green, and they got fitted for new ones every year to go with the black accessories (gloves, boots, belts), but Jazz's always disappeared within hours and Danny's was normally never touched. Danny was pretty sure Jazz dumped hers into the sewage and that there was a pile of them down there somewhere. Maybe he could go look for it now that he was a-

"This baby uses satellites to lead you right to the ghosts!"

Danny snapped out of his train of thought to stutter, "It uses what to track... _what_?"

Danny's father pressed a few buttons on the machine and it started speaking. "WELCOME TO THE FENTON FINDER," it said in an automated woman's voice. "A GHOST IS NEAR." Jazz lowered her book a little and gave her parents a skeptical look and Maddie gave a slight gasp. Danny's mind was racing. His ghost sense hadn't gone off so that would mean it was sensing _him_? Danny stood up out of his chair and made to pick up his bowl when the Fenton Finder spoke up again. "WALK FORWARD." Jack and Maddie began to step towards him, eyes on the contraption. Danny quickly abandoned the bowl and started backing away until they had cornered him against the wall. "GHOST LOCATED. THANK YOU FOR USING THE FENTON FINDER."

Danny placed a nervous grin on his face as his parents looked down at him, confused. "Well that can't be right!" His father exclaimed. He began to tinker with it but Danny could just see over the top of it that the little blip on the radar refused to move. As Danny stood there, nerves being stretched to their limits, he could only think about the monologues his parents would give about what they would do when they finally caught a ghost. All the biology classes they'd taken, all the different tools they kept clean and sharp at all times, all the samples they would take... He just wanted to disappear.

And then he did.

Danny was quick to notice that his nose had suddenly disappeared and, looking down at the rest of him, he panicked at the fact that... there was no rest of him. He could still feel the air hitting him, so he wasn't intangible, just invisible. Of course that didn't scare the crap out of him any less and he jumped, letting out a yip of panic, before becoming visible again.

"Well, I did try to tell you I needed two more days, sweetie," his mom was saying, pulling down her hood and goggles.

_I have tell them, _he thought to himself. _They'll find out eventually, better sooner than later._ But flashes of dissection videos from his new freshman bio class kept coming to mind and his imagination kept inserting him and his parents. But he shoved it all to the back of his mind and took a deep breath.

"Actually, I-" Danny started to say, "I... need to tell you guys something..." Danny hung his head and his parents looked at him curiously.

"That's not all you need, Danny." Three heads turned as Jazz clapped her book closed and stood. "You need guidance, and parents who can provide it."

"Sweetie," Maddie started as Jazz came to stand beside her brother where he stood against the wall. "I _know_ what we do doesn't make sense sometimes, but you're only-"

"Sixteen." Jazz crossed her arms. "Biologically." Danny raised his eyebrows but was actually great-full he had interfered. As she kept talking, he began to slowly inch himself away from them. "But psychologically I'm an adult and I will not allow your insane obsession with ghosts to pollute the mind of this impressionable little child!" As her voice grew, she linked her arm around Danny's and pulled him closer again. "Come, you unwanted wretch," she told him in an oddly kind voice that was scaring him more than the wails of ghosts, "_I'll_ drive you to school." With that she sent one last glare to her parents before hauling Danny back to the kitchen table where they began to pick up their things.

Danny knew Jazz couldn't hear it, but Danny could just barely pick up the hushed words of his mother as he tossed his bowl in the sink.

"Huh. That's weird," she was saying. "Jasmine _never_ offers to drive Danny to school."

"That could mean only one thing..." his dad began and Danny picked up the pace. He threw his bag over his shoulder and hurried Jazz out the door, telling her they should pick up his friends on the way so they needed to hurry. He didn't need to hear Jack as he shut the front door behind him to know he was saying. "That's not our daughter, that's a ghost." As he shut the passenger door to Jazz's blue Ford Focus, he could hear him yell, "DANNY NO IT'S A TRAP!"

But Jazz was already pulling away from the curb as their father burst through the door, his wife in hot pursuit.

Danny slumped down in his chair, relieved to be away from his parents. Not like school was any better, but at least there he could blend in among the crowd and no one would notice if he fell through his chair for a second or if his feet disappeared.

"Where did you say you meet with them?" Jazz asked, referring to how Danny would walk to school with Sam and Tucker every morning. Danny let out a sigh and sat up straight again. "Turn left here."

* * *

><p>Hidden amongst a crowd of high-schoolers was the perfect place to talk secrets. Anything over heard would quickly be lost in the swirl of other voices and the sounds of shuffling feet, burping and laughter. No one would pay any mind to what three kids with nothing special about them were saying. Anyone would just waltz right on by, missing any conversation they might be having about robbing a bank or stealing from a jewelry shop.<p>

Or how to take down a ghost.

"So adding to the list of things we've learned," Tucker was saying as he typed on his PDA, "we have 'Octopi ghosts, ironically, do not like water."

"How do you know they don't like water?" Sam asked, raising an eyebrow.

"Well, see yesterday we needed a lot of water," Danny said, referring to how Tucker had come to his house while his parents were away. "We had to get buckets of it because the more you drink the faster you have to pee, and we were trying to see how far we could-"

"Ok," Sam let go of the strap on her spider backpack to hold up her hands, show casing her many Gothic wrist accessories, and turned her head in disgust. "I think I get the point." Tucker snickered and Danny gave him a high five behind her back. "Anyway," Sam turned from the curb where Jazz had dropped them off and started walking toward the front doors of Casper High School, not waiting as her friends ran to catch up. "I think we need to add, 'Dying does not increase maturity levels'."

"Aw, c'mon Sam! It's the first comfy clothes Monday we've had since...well, y'know." Danny stopped awkwardly at the near mention of 'the accident' with the ghost portal that had pretty much screwed over their hopeful high school careers. "But don't wreck comfy clothes Monday," he said smirking. On the first Monday of every month, Danny, Sam, and Tucker would wear their favorite outfits to school; a kind of motivational tool for the bullied and Monday haters. Danny had his white and red shirt and jeans, Tucker had his cargo pants and horribly clashing yellow shirt, and Sam had Gothic ensemble number 42: midriff-showing black tank top, green and black plaid skirt, purple tights, combat boots, black collar, and all topped off with a skull for a belt buckle. Just because everyone else at school sacrificed comfort for acceptance doesn't mean they had to.

"How long is this list now, exactly?" Sam asked Tucker, letting Danny open the front door for them.

"Well," Tucker pulled out a stylus from the back of his PDA and began to scroll across the screen. "Starting from a month ago, we have, 'Danny's half-dead', 'Danny's being half dead gives him ghost powers', 'Danny's powers come with a semi-cliché wardrobe change', 'White hair does not necessarily equal old', 'Danny's parents learning their son is half of their favorite prey is not, and never will be, anywhere near the top of the to-do list'...need I go on, or do you need me to keep reading through lunch about Danny's inability to aim a gum wrapper into a dumpster two feet away?"

"Hey!" Danny flushed a bit as they walked past yet another couple making out in the hallway under a heavily vandalized 'School Spirit!' sign. "My aim's getting better, and - and..." Danny faltered and let out a huge sigh. "I think I should tell them." Sam and Tucker barely heard him through the chatter of the halls and comments about lost underwear.

Danny's shoulders slumped and he started climbing the stairs to the second floor. Sam and Tucker exchanged a quick glance. Nothing's more of a downer than a best friend walking around depressed, but then they couldn't really blame him. Poor kid had been raised by ghost hunters who told him nothing but stories about how Hansel and Gretel were almost eaten by a Ghost Witch, the Maleficent Ghost and Sleeping Beauty, and how in Little Red Riding Hood a Ghostbuster came and exorcised the ghost that killed grandma. In a Fenton's eyes he had been thrown into a fairy tale and forced into the role of the villain. Sam and Tucker knew he wasn't, but would his parents? Did Danny?

"Why?" Sam followed Danny up the stairs. "Parents don't listen. Even worse, they don't understand!" Tucker and Danny stopped on the landing and turned, waiting for Sam to finish shouting to the ceiling, "_WHY CAN'T THEY ACCEPT ME FOR WHO I AM?_"

"Sam, I-" Danny figured he better stop Sam from embarrassing herself. No matter how much he enjoyed looking at how goofy Sam looked when she shouted her irritations to the world. Which she actually did quite a bit lately. That, and the funniest clown on earth couldn't lift his mood right now. "I'm talking about _my_ powers. _My_ problems." Danny thrust his thumb toward his chest and Tucker just had a sarcasm dripping, incredulous look on his face.

"Oh, right," Sam chuckled and glanced down at an awkward angle. "Me... too?"

Danny let it go without a second thought and continued a little panic in his voice, "It's been a month since the accident and I still barely have any control! If someone catches me..." Danny crossed his arms as he continued speaking and glared ahead of him, only wondering in the back of his mind what that weird feeling in his legs was. "...I go from geek to freak around here!"

"Kinda like what you're doing now?" Tucker asked, teal eyes looking down at him.

Down at him?

Danny looked down and suddenly realized that the floor had come up to his waist - or rather his legs and what was left of his torso were sinking down through the floor. He let out a strangled yell and lifted his arms above his head, as if the sand were quicksand, and felt himself freeze up while to sets of arms grabbed him under his shoulders and hoisted his feet back up to their level. It only took a moment to figure out how to re-solidify his legs again (he'd been going through the same process with pretty much every other body part for the last month) so his friends could drop him to the ground again. Going intangible was an interesting and fun power, but there was something about it, Danny couldn't quite put his finger on it yet, the he really didn't like.

"Darn it!" Danny shouted at his legs, remembering all the talks his mom and dad (and his third parent, Jazz) had given him about not giving into the peer pressure of using 'language so dirty it should only come from the mouth of a ghost' (well, not so much the ghosts part for Jazz). Speaking of his dad... "If my dad can invent something that accidentally made me _half ghost_, why can't he invent something that turns me back to normal!" As Danny finished climbing the steps, Sam and Tucker in tow, he shoved his hand into his jean's pockets and let his head drop again. All these sleepless nights had left him unable to even hold a temper for more than a few minutes anymore. He didn't even notice when he walked past the next row of pale green lockers and straight through a vending machine.

"Danny," Sam ran in front of her friend, hoping to reassure him and that no one had seen that, "your powers make you unique. Unique is good! That's why I'm an Ultra Recyclo Vegetarian!" Sam placed her fists on her hips, jangling the black array of accessories on her wrists.

Danny and Tucker both stopped in front of her. Danny still had his hands in his pockets but Tucker let a bewildered look set onto his face as he asked, "Which means...what?"

"She doesn't eat anything with a face on it," Danny deadpanned, only glancing at Tucker.

"Oh, who cares about that stuff?" Tucker lifted a hand and pointed at himself. "Two words, Danny. Meat. Connoisseur." Tucker leaned over and sniffed Danny's shirt that he knew he hadn't changed out of since the previous day. Straightening back up, on hand still in the air, he stated, "Last night, you had sloppy joes."

Danny smirked. "Impressive," he admitted.

"Meat heightens the senses," Tucker recited. "My all-meat streak is fourteen years strong."

"And it's about to end." Sam crossed her arms, a proud smirk playing on her face. "The school board finally agreed to try a new cafeteria menu. I wore them down," she sighed.

"Wait." Danny and Tucker both gaped at her, but Tucker was falling into worry. "_What did you do?_"

* * *

><p>As they approached the lunch lady with their trays, Tucker had his head leaning back toward the large sign above their heads that read: THIS WEEK ULTRA RECYCLO-VEGITARIAN! Danny didn't need to look to know Tucker wasn't actually looking at it though. His head had been stuck up in that position for the past five minutes as they waited through the line, but his eyes had closed four minutes ago as he tried fruitlessly to wake himself up from this nightmare.<p>

Danny watched, pale faced, as the lady behind the counter dropped...something onto Star Strong's tray. When a similar...item landed on his own he took in a deep breath and held it, unwilling to let go. "You can open your eyes now, Tuck."

Tucker peaked down as his tray and let his face drop in utter horror. The look would have been comical to Danny if it didn't show a slight exaggeration on the same thing he was feeling.

Sam on the other hand, laughed.

"What is this?" Danny asked, unwilling to touch it. "Grass on a bun?"

Which it literally was. Apparently the lunch lady's didn't really have much to work with because what Danny was looking at literally appeared to be grass growing out of a slice of bread. And not even good grass. Danny was pretty sure he just saw Mikey Baker walk away with a dandelion sticking out of his.

Tucker, with an over dramatized flair accented from the drama class he took in eighth grade, shouted, "_What have you done_?"

Sam just lifted her turf-wich and proudly told him, "Tucker, it's time for a change."

Danny had to drag Tucker across the floor to their table.

* * *

><p>In most homes holding teenagers, the average volume is unbearably loud and obnoxious save for the eight to ten hours in which the kids are away at school, sports, or part-time jobs. This time is when the adults cherish the quiet of their city block. The adults will go for jogs, walk to the park, or simply read a book in their gardens.<p>

Unless they lived near Fenton Works.

Jack and Maddie Fenton crouched on the cluttered ground of their lab over their newest invention. The last several attempts had been proven explosive, but between the extra cables trailing from either end of the room, scribbles and notes how _not_ to finish the experiment, and the visually assaulting day-glow orange of Jacks jumpsuit which they had finally cleaned from the last explosion, they were pretty certain that it would work this time...maybe.

Behind them, the Fenton Portal in the wall lay open, heavy metal doors spread wide. Earlier, Maddie had been experimenting with the thin, natural barrier of energy created between the air of their world and the mysterious energy on the other side. The Fentons dare not touch the barrier before they quite understood it, but couldn't stop them from doing science. While Jack spent his time working on something akin to a fishing rod that he would be able to use to 'fish out ghosts', Maddie had worked from a more observant stand point. She was curious about the spiral pattern the energy took, almost as if the ghostly energy of the other world were flushing into theirs, or vice-versa. Maddie had begun working on a device to measure reading of ecto-energy when her husband had called her to help finish the urgent matter of their daughter.

"Maybe this is a bad idea..." she said, thoughtfully.

"No, it's perfect," Jack assured her. He had just finished welding the last piece of cable together (thankfully not exploding this time) and lifted what looked like a glorified, green trimmed, vacuum cleaner from the '50s. "When Jazz gets home we suck the ghost out of her with the Fenton Extractor."

"But what if Jazz isn't a ghost? What if we accidentally hurt her?"

"Maddie the Fenton Extractor doesn't hurt humans..." he gently scoffed at his wife.

Unbeknownst to both, however, a pale, glowing figure drifted through the spiral gateway behind them. She took the form of an old lady, but in no way little. In kinder terms, she was fairly big-boned. Her pink sun dress was covered by a white kitchen apron and her large hands were covered with yellow rubber gloves. Her white hair was kept under a pink net, fully exposing the bags under her eyes and faint purple lipstick could almost be seen on her lips. All in all she could pull off being a fairly kind school lunch lady.

If not for being able to see the wall behind her through her sickly green, translucent, skin.

She stared around the dark, cluttered lab for a moment before fully pulling her way through the Fenton Portal. She almost seemed to be able to tell that something was amiss and she could just feel it. Then a look of dawning realization came to her glowing green eyes and she gave a sweet smile. "Ohhh," she chided to an unknown recipient. "Somebody changed the menu!" With those words she flew up past the hanging lights and straight through the ceiling.

At that moment, Jack was still saying, "...unless it gets in your hair," and the Fenton Extractor seemed to activate all by itself and began sucking violently on Jack short cropped black bangs, leaving the shorter, graying hair in the back. Jack yelled as a chunk of his hair was yanked from his head and into the end and traveled through the tubing and to the containment box at the other end before shutting itself off. "See?" He grinned to assure his wife while she chuckled, shaking her head, and went to get the secret Fenton Hair-Growth Formula.

* * *

><p>"Don't you think this is a little extreme, Sam?" Danny held his spoon full of turf-wich apprehensively.<p>

Just then, a hand appeared on Sam's shoulder. "Ah, Ms. Manson." All three looked up at Mr. Lancer. Lancer was vice principal and English teacher at Casper High, and fit well into the overweight teacher stereotype. He was wearing a blue dress shirt rolled to the elbows and a black tie to clash with his plaid slacks. Maybe he was hoping it would distract from his bald head, bushy eye brows, or oddly pointy, box-shaped-chin (that he tried to hide with slightly abstract facial hair), or he simply did not have a taste for anything tasteful. The only redeeming visual quality that he had was that he was taller than most of the students...and maybe the fact that all the fat went straight to his belly instead of everywhere else.

"The school board wanted me to personally thank you for ushering in this welcome experiment to our cafeteria," he told Sam with a smile. She lifted her head proudly.

Tucker suddenly sat up straight and sniffed the air. "Meat," he said, almost like a dog that smelled squirrel. "Near." He glanced around before honing in on Mr. Lancer and sniffing him. Whatever it was it smelled good. Tucker stopped and glared at the teacher.

"No, no," Mr. Lancer raised his hands in defense. "The rumors about the new all-steak buffet in the teachers' lounge are completely untrue." Lancer smiled and turned back to Sam. "Thanks again," he said, and walked off. As he walked away Danny could have sworn he saw him pull a toothpick out of his pocket.

"Yeah," Tucker chuckled sarcastically. "Thanks again for making us eat garbage, Sam."

"It's not garbage," he lifted her turf-witch. "It's recyclable organic matter."

"It's garbage," Danny and Tucker unisoned.

* * *

><p>Back in the line, the last student was walking away with her 'lunch'. The old lady behind the counter in her uniform - pink dress, yellow gloves, white apron - glanced around over her pointy nose before pulling a fresh grilled cheese burger out of her apron pocket.<p>

She grinned and turned back to the kitchens to eat her prize just as a pale green figure dropped through the ceiling behind her. The ghost looked over the oblivious lady's shoulder at what she was about to eat before smiling sweetly and saying, "Well that's not good." The lunch lady nearly jumped out of her wrinkling skin and dropped her burger. When she turned around her eyes went wide with horror and her knees started shaking. "It's against lunch lady policy to eat the kid's food, don'cha know? How do you think I went?" She chuckled. "Just one wrong kebab and suddenly there's no one to make sure the children are gettin' fed. But I'm sure you'll be _fine_." The ghost smiled sweetly but old lady was already running out the exit, scream stuck in her throat.

The ghost's sweetly smiling eyes were brought from the still swinging door down to the table next to her where a book labeled Ultra Recyclo Veggie Lunch Menu was sitting. The smile fell off her face and she picked it up, the corner of the front cover still visible through her hand. The menu _never_ called for recycled vegetables...

* * *

><p>Danny was staring mournfully at his spoon full of dirt (dessert) when the air he was breathing suddenly dropped twenty degrees. He had to drop his spoon onto the table as he started coughing at the irritation of the cold in his throat and he could feel the skin on his hand itch when he coughed a cloud of ice crystals into it. "Uuh, guys?" he managed. When he looked up long enough to see that Sam and Tucker had definitely noticed the fact he was practically breathing snow he coughed out, "I have a problem."<p>

As he spoke, Danny could feel is mouth reheating to what he had come to accept as normal. Ever since the accident his average temperature had dropped a good ten degrees. They were all pretty freaked out at first, but after a week of long sleeves and hand-warmers they tabbed it under 'Dead People Side-Effects' and went on to rig the Fenton Thermometer to not freak out if Danny's parents ever insisted to use it on him.

Danny had just enough time to sit up straight again before he felt something cold and sloppy nail him in the back of the head. "FENTON!"

"Make that two problems."

Danny started attempting to scratch the already drying mud off the back of his head as he stood up and turned around to what he already knew was Dash Baxter marching towards him. Dash had started targeting Danny as early as kindergarten and hadn't let up since. For the past nine years or so Danny had gotten used to being the personal punching bag of a large kid with anger issues, but this first month of high school had taught him very early that yes, things can get worse. Some people would say it's a good thing that the American perspective sees men in tights slamming into each other as a career path - Danny, and every other kid who has nightmares about Letterman jackets, disagrees. "I ordered three mud pies," Dash was fuming as Danny stared up at him. Dash was holding a lunch tray in his left hand that looked like it had been stuck under a waterfall of mud. "Do you know what they gave me? Three. Mud. Pies. With _mud_. From the _ground!" _Maybe it had. "All because of _your_ girlfriend."

Danny winced at that. Dash may have the potential for a career as a professional hobo, but he somehow always managed to make any bad situation he came to Danny's fault. But there was that last bit…

"She's not my girlfriend!" Sure they had been friends since they met in middle school while hiding in the janitor's closet during parent-teacher conferences, but three years of _friendship_ did not equate dating. Well, Danny didn't think that it did, but he wouldn't know, he wasn't very good at math.

"I'm not his girlfriend!" Doesn't mean that didn't hurt a little.

Dash reached out and grabbed a fist full of Danny's shirt and lifted him a good six inches off the ground so he was level with Dash's square, blonde head. The girls at school swore up and down that Dash's blue eyes were like cool, blue, dreams. Danny thought they looked like soapy toilet water, but he guessed it was a matter of opinion. He wasn't really in the mood for thinking about it too much because he was pretty sure the girl at the next table over was giggling about Danny's lack of ab muscle that was now being displayed to the entire school while Dash spat in his face, still gripping his shirt. "These are the best years of my life!" He was spraying. The Danny from long ago would have made a 'say it, don't spray it' comment but he had since then learned that that was a bad idea. "After high school it's all down-hill for me." _Well at least he acknowledges it._ "How am I supposed to enjoy my glory days eating _mud_?"

"Actually, it's top soil." Still not his girlfriend.

"Whatever!" Dash threw Danny onto a lunch table bench and he barely got his hands up in time to keep his head from smacking directly into the table. The girls who had been occupying the table a few moments ago quickly picked up their things and hightailed it to the back of the surrounding crowd.

As he lifted himself into an actual sitting position, Dash slammed the mud tray down in front of him and shoved a spoon full of it in front of Danny's face. "Eat it. _All_ of it."

In just about any other situation, Danny probably would have talked back to that and try to slip his way out of this. The problem this time was that Sam was just a few feet away and behind her was a crowd of people smarter than Dash. Any one of them, if given the time to think about it, would put two and two together and realize that the one at fault was Sam and _she_ should be the one eating the 'top soil' and being assigned a week crammed in her locker.

Before any of that could happen, Danny - heroically as possible - scooped up a spoon full of what he was pretty sure his bio teacher told him was worm crap, and as bravely as he could (so not very) lifted the spoon to his mouth and tried to think about anything other than worms. Anything would do: the itch the dirt was kicking up on the back of his hair, the bruise on his knee from being thrown into the table, the invisible ice pop that seemed to be working his way up his throat -

Crap.

Danny hadn't realized he had closed his eyes till he opened them to watch a green lunch lady float past on the other side of the kitchen window.

Now he was really worrying about his new definition of a weird thought.

"Uhhm," he muttered involuntarily. Dash raised an eye brow at him as if saying, "_Well, get on with it, Fenton_." "Uhh..." Danny searched for a distraction, green lunch ladies were more important than who ate the mud on his spoon. The mud on his spoon.

The mud on the tray.

"Garbage fight!" Dash had a split second to look surprised before Danny lifted the tray and slammed it into his face. Danny barely heard the rallying cry from the rest of the crowd while he slid under the table, unsurprised to meet Tucker there. They could hear the insane cheering and screaming and the sound of splatting mud was so frequent it almost sounded like rain. Somewhere in a corner one of the skater kids pulled out a stereo and started blasting a Skrillex track loud enough to break some of the teachers' hearing aids.

Tucker had started cracking up at the hilarity of the whole situation - the student body was a crowd of mindless sheep - but a shout from above their table distracted them. Danny looked to his right and found a face full of combat boot.

"It's not mud," Sam was screaming, "it's-!"

Danny reached up and grabbed the hem of her top and pulled her under the table as a milk carton flew by her head. One look and a quick glance towards the kitchens was all it took to get her game face on and Danny peeked out from under the table to find a clear path through the chaos. When he found one (between a junior football player and his girlfriend who had just got pied in the middle of a make out session) he motioned to his friends and started crawling on all fours between legs and busted milk cartons that were already coating the floor.

Only later would Sam explain to him the _wonders_ of the 'milk' people could produce organically without needing to 'enslave' a cow. He showered twice a day for a week.

When he checked over his shoulder to make sure his friends were following, Dash spotted him. Mud was dripping off his nose and his skinny jeans looked permanently grass stained. "You're gonna pay for this, FENTON!" He shouted just in time to get hit in the face and the back of the head at the same time.

_Great, I'm still his favorite_, Danny thought to himself as he turned and kept crawling.

Somehow Danny, Tucker, and Sam managed to reach the kitchen door, Tucker's hat only slightly worse for wear. Sam turned back to the mob to keep watch while Danny cracked open the door to peak through, Tucker looking over his shoulder. "Huh," Tucker let out a puff of air that ruffled Danny's thick hair. "Shouldn't be so bad, she looks a little like my grandmother."

Danny had met Grandma Foley, and couldn't bring himself to agree. Well, unless Grandma Foley started floating and her chocolate skin turned green, then sure, she looked exactly like his grandmother.

The ghost was looking at a bowl of salad on the opposite side of the kitchen, the look on her face almost confused. Danny still wasn't sure ghosts had real emotions, his parents kept telling him they didn't, but she seemed to feel lost. _Well, if she made it this far out of the Ghost Zone_, Danny was thinking, _she is _definitely _lost._

But then old people seemed to get lost a lot.

"Shouldn't she be haunting a bingo hall?" Danny muttered to Tucker. Tucker let out a laugh and they both stood up, cautiously stepping inside. A few moments later Sam joined them.

Danny didn't realize until the door shut behind them that the metal door that rolled down in front of the window to the lunch line had been closed and the noise in the cafeteria almost completely cut off. The only thing reminding him that there was a room full of innocent bystanders next door was the heavy dubstep bass that was reverberating through the walls. The whole place seemed surprisingly clean to Danny, save for a lone cheese burger on the floor Tucker was staring hungrily at, but he'd wonder about that later. He had always pictured the place that turned out slop dutifully every day would be a mess but the whole place seemed recently washed. Everything but the pile of dirty dishes by the sink, but pretty much everything else was hung up and in order.

The ghost - that Danny hereby deemed 'The Lunch Lady' until further notice - turned at the sound of their footsteps, having just set the salad back onto the counter. Danny flinched as she turned but she didn't yell at or attack them, she just floated over with a nervous twitch to her eyebrows and asked, "Children, can you help me? Today's lunch is meatloaf, but I don't see the meatloaf." Her voice had a noticeable echo to it, like it was being said across an empty void and she smiled when she asked. "Did someone change the menu?"

This was new. Out of all the ghosts that had crawled out of the portal and into his parents' lab so far, none of them seemed capable of any coherent thought, much less talking.

"Yeah," Tucker waisted no time in pointing at Sam and saying, "She did."

Danny tried to think back on the moment later to justify this, (Tucker was mad a Sam still, he had a slower than normal brain, the ghost really _did_ look like his grandmother) but every path led to the same conclusion: Tucker was an idiot.

Because not one second after processing that statement, The Lunch Lady's hair caught into white fire and her eyes seemed to be having a red spazz attack. The trio let out a collective gasp as she doubled in size and loudly proclaimed, "The menu has been the same for fifty years!" Somewhere in there her dress ignited with green fire that Danny personally thought was overkill, but when she let out the most threatening 'RAWR' an old lady could (which was actually pretty threatening, under the circumstances) the green 'smoke' coming off of her began collecting on the ceiling and swirling like a funnel cloud. Danny covered his head with his arms as the lights blew with loud pops and glass shattered across the floor. The whole room was glowing green, it's only light source being a very upset Lunch Lady.

Without thinking Danny spread out his arms and ordered, not very convincingly, to his friends, "Get behind me!"

Tucker and Sam obeyed, but Danny couldn't help catching Sam's remark of, "Wow, I feel safe."

But he shook it off and put his own game face back on to heroically shout, "I'm goin' ghost!"

Now, according to Tucker, Danny's 'transformation sequence' looked like something between Sailor Moon and a cloning pod from a sci-fi movie opening, but Danny had never looked in a mirror mid-morph before so that was all he had to go off of. It's not that he hadn't tried looking in a mirror, but he couldn't see anything past the blinding white light shooting past his face so he decided to trust Tucker on that one.

From Danny's standpoint, he couldn't quite find a way to fully describe it. Sure, his entire molecular structure was flipping inside out and turning backwards but he didn't feel much more than a tingle. The tingle was everywhere and he shivered after every transformation for about a week but that he could get over. What he would never get over was the feeling of his clothes changing. The clothes thing was still filed under the 'WTF' column (a.k.a. the 'We'll Figure It Out Later' column) since that's the gist of what Danny thought every time his ultra-baggy clothes turned into a skintight, black, hazmat - an inverted copy of the one he wore the day of the accident. Or maybe it _was_ the one he wore, they never did find it. Anyway, it would have been one thing if it started at his wrists or his ankles or something, but that it started at his waist made it feel more like he was being given a hug that kept getting bigger. Basically, there is no other feeling like having a mystical, unknown force change your clothes for you.

But in the mean time, Danny Phantom (Sam thought of the name) was the only thing standing between his friends and a giant, probably people-eating, lunch lady, and he had a super hero gig to catch.

As soon as he remembered how to fly.

_Flight; it's just...weightlessness_, he thought to himself, and took a deep breath. Steeling his face, he pushed himself off the ground and reminded himself that the laws of physics not kicking in was the new normal. Danny flew up closer to the ghost but still remained a protective distance from his friends.

Unfamiliar with ghosts intelligent enough to make conversation, he tried to look as threatening as possible and shouted the first thing that came to his head. "I command you to...go away!"

Danny's stomach was suddenly far more acquainted with gravity than the rest of him when the Lunch Lady just grinned, showing off, Danny shuddered, pointed white teeth. He flinched as she lifted her hand and Danny looked to his left just in time to see a flock on glowing green dishes start flying towards his face.

'_Going intangible_', Danny remembered Tucker saying, '_as well as going invisible, seems to be activated more by state of mind than by anything else_.'

'_So when I think about it, it just happens_?'

'_Pretty much_.'

So Danny clenched his fists, closed his eyes, thought about it really hard and hoped for the best.

Danny's everywhere started tingling and, just when he was thinking it might have worked, he flinched when the first plate slipped through him. The surprise was stuttering, but he managed to hold onto the tingling feeling until the firing stopped and he opened his eyes to find himself solid and no worse for wear. Behind him, the plates had hit the wall and shattered across the floor. He smiled to himself until he noticed the number of plates on the ground.

Wait, weren't there more than-

A shriek cut off his thoughts and he turned to see another stack hurtling towards Sam.

'_Ghosts have no real, solid form_,' Danny's mom had told him at dinner once. '_They're made of ectoplasm and a core, and can shift their form from their default shape if they wish. It's not that they're all shape shifters, but they can, for example, turn specific body parts into something more akin to a fog or a tail for the sake of speed_.'

Danny had never been more glad for listening to his mother.

Letting all feeling in his legs go, Danny shot himself towards Sam, arching his path over the empty dirty dish bin next to the abandoned sink, and, before he could truly process it himself, held the bin in front of him and Sam like a shield. The Lunch Lady let out a roar as the dishes clanked together and miraculously settled in the bottom of the bin. She thrust out her hand again and a new stack of bowls and cooking sheets hurled themselves at Tucker. Grabbing another bin of counter he managed to collect most of the dishes before they shattered across the floor. Tucker looked at the impossibly heavy load of dirty dishes he was holding and smiled a face that read 'I told you so'.

'_Super strength_', Tucker had told him at lunch one day, 'should_ be possible. If what your parents said about a ghost's control over their own ectoplasm is right, you should be able to focus it in your arms long enough for a strength boost to rival most pro wrestlers_.'

Danny let out a chuckle. "Well, if this superhero thing doesn't work out I could have an exciting career as a bus boy." As he set the bins back on the counters though, a huge thumping kicked up behind him. He whirled around in time to see the oven bouncing up and down, a loud groaning started as they pulled off from whatever piping or wiring it was that was holding them to the walls. The Lunch Lady, even more on fire than before, floated in front of them.

"I control lunch," she growled. "Lunch is sacred! Lunch has rules!"

Then, in the blink of an eye, she was Tucker's grandma again. The fire disappeared, her teeth leveled out, and the smile on her face was sweet again when she held up what appeared to be a slice of a five year old girl's birthday cake and asked, not looking at Danny, "Anyone want cake?"

Danny froze and glanced at Sam and Tucker, who were standing together, backs against the far wall behind a rack on hanging pans with mouths hanging open, eyes almost as wide as his felt. They glanced at each other before turning back to the Lunch Lady and slowly nodded their heads.

"Too bad!" The sharp teeth, fully red eyes, and green fire were back, "Children who change _my_ menu do not get dessert!"

With that she flew through the ceiling and the ovens ignited behind her. First the stoves lit up, then the belly doors flung open and spewed fire like flame throwers across the room. Danny had to float higher to get out of the way, but he still felt the heat singe his face as he just barely dodged in time. Panic gripped him as he swung his head around, looking for Sam and Tucker. He spotted them crouching low in a corner. It looked like they had ducked behind the pan racks in time to get away unsinged, but now the ovens had detached themselves from the wall and hurtled themselves toward the kids like rabbid oven-monsters, the dials almost looking like eyes in the fire-light.

In pretty much any super hero comic he read, or any movie he watched, the hero would have blasted the bad guy to bits and walked out with a few scratches from the shrapnel. Unfortunately for Danny, however, he was fresh out of projectile weapons or anything large enough to smash metal, and one of the ovens seemed to still be attached to a gas line. One wrong hit and the whole place would explode. The easy escape for him was straight through the wall, but Sam and Tucker couldn't go intangible.

Or could they?

Before he could give himself doubts, Danny threw himself behind his friends and grabbed the backs of their shirts. They both flinched at his sudden hold, but Danny barely noticed. Focusing more than he ever had in his life, he forced himself to go intangible and waited for the strange tingle to take over before shoving as much energy he could through his hands, out his fingertips, and into Sam and Tucker. He took his eyes off the Oven of Death long enough to see the surprised expressions on their faces as they looked down at themselves before heaving backwards and throwing all three of them through the wall.

Once he knew they were through he tried to drop his friends but let his concentration slip too far and they all tumbled onto the floor. He only barely registered the thumps he heard behind them as the oven doors colliding with the wall. Lifting his head off the floor, he took in the pale green lockers and yellow walls before letting himself believe he was really in an empty school hallway. He stood up and glanced at his friends where they were crawling to their feet in front of him to make sure they were safe before smiling and letting out the breath he hadn't known he was holding. "Hey, it worked!" He felt like he just ran a lap around the school track and his head was throbbing but worked was worked. "Think I can turn things invisible, too?"

"Sure, Danny," Sam lifted herself to her feet, rubbing a bruised shoulder. "Try it on Dash's pants later, but in the mean time, there's a lunch obsessed ghost running around the school with a grudge on me! _This_ is the thanks I get for thinking like an individual?" She threw her hands in the air.

"Uh," Tucker straightened his hat, "Where exactly did the ghost go?"

As if on cue, Danny got a chill that crawled its way down his spine just before the lights above their heads started spraying sparks across the lockers. Danny shielded his head with his arms until the lights gave one last flicker and died out, leaving hallway dark. The glow Danny was giving off was enough that they weren't left in total darkness, but it was a small comfort when the walls started shaking.

Danny turned around just in time to watch the lockers lining the walls begin to burst open, letting their contents fall into the windstorm that had suddenly picked up and be swept down the hallway. Through the flying papers, books, and occasional t-shirt, Danny could just make out the shape of the Lunch Lady. It took all of two seconds to put together that she was messing with them, trying to scare them.

_I've never fought anything this strong before_, Danny ducked to avoid a flying math book, _punching an ectopus through the portal is one thing, but the Fenton Portal is at least a miles walk away and I don't think she's afraid of water_. Danny fisted his hands to keep them from trembling. _Pull it together, Fenton_.

Then Tucker started sniffing.

"Steak. Rib-eye. Boarder House. Medium Rare." Danny turned and raised an eyebrow at Tucker only to have an actual medium rare steak fly past his face. He turned around in time to duck an incoming rib. "But, where did it come from?" He heard Tucker mumble to himself over the roar of the wind before coming to, "Lancer."

_All rumors start somewhere_, Danny mused. _This one apparently started at a buffet in the teacher's lounge_.

"Prepare to learn why meat is the most powerful of the five food groups!" Danny whipped back around to the Lunch Lady only to see what could only be described as a giant, humanoid meat monster with glowing red eyes.

"Did she cover herself in...?" Danny trailed off.

"Yes," Sam looked pale. "Yes, she did."

"Well, I guess if you're going to control food, you might as well pick the best kind," Tucker shrugged. Sam hit him across the head.

The Lunch Lady's eyes faded back to green and she pulled a cookie out of one of her meat-arms. "Cookie?" she asked. Danny and Tucker didn't dare move, but Sam shook her head. "THEN PERISH!"

"Forget it!" Danny slid himself in front of Sam, tae kwon do basics his mom had taught him coming back. Maybe having a ghost-hunting, protective parent could be a good thing. "The only thing that has an expiration date here is you!" Danny knew full well how stupid that sounded, but the stupidity of it all seemed to be calming him down. Maybe it _could_ be just like the cartoons on T.V. Danny lifted his fist and tried to think about what he did with his strength earlier with the dishes. Just...focus to your fists right?

Not right.

Next thing Danny knew, white sparks started and his hands and feet and were shooting up his arms and legs, leaving jeans and gloveless hands behind them. One moment, a potential ghost super hero is finally getting his confidence, and next a wimpy freshman is wondering why his life suddenly sucks. "Whoops. I...didn't mean to do that."

The meat monster let out a roar of triumph and rage and a giant, meaty hand lifted Danny off the ground. Normally the smell of all that fresh-cooked meat would make him hungry, but with his heart pounding in his ears and the no doubt Sam-fueled thought of 'I'm covered in slimy, dead, animal guts', he thought he was going to hurl. It didn't help when she threw him, and his stomach, into Tucker, slamming them both into the lockers and dropping what remained in them on top of their heads.

White spots swam across Danny's vision and he let out a groan. He thought he heard a scream but when he tried to sit up, his hand slipped on someone's failed math quiz (might have been his) and his stomach gave an unhelpful lurch. His head was still pounding from when he pulled Tucker and Sam through the wall (_Why did I do that again_?) and the bump on the back on his head he found seemed to be making it worse.

"C'mon!" Danny forced his head up and opened his eyes when Tucker started shaking him. _At least he's OK. _But where was Sam? "The Meat-o-saurous nabbed Sam! Change back! We gotta go!"

"You two aren't 'going' anywhere." Danny's stomach lurched again as a hand grabbed his shirt from behind and hauled him to his feet. He didn't need to turn his head to know what teacher had just walked in a good two seconds late. Or was it a full minute? Why was the world spinning without him? Why didn't he hear Lancer coming? Why was he asking so many questions?

After a moment the floor leveled out again and Danny managed to focus on another pair of angry footsteps coming to join Mr. Lancer in the 'Let's Bust Nerdy Teens' club.

"Told 'ja you'd pay, FEN-TON!"

Danny exchanged a glance with Tucker. _Crap_.

* * *

><p><strong>Date Posted: June 19, 2012<strong>

**Word Count: 10,017**


	3. Mystery Meat Part II

**Sorry about the long wait, procrastinating is adictive. This is the last part of episode one. The next two episodes are going to be mushed together into the next three or four chapters. I've been on a writing streak lately so hopefully it'll be up a lot faster than this one. I'd also like to know if anyone out there would be interested in a Gravity Falls crossover with Dani. My brain has been obsessing over it lately.**

**Anyway, enjoy! =)**

* * *

><p><strong>Mystery Meat<strong>

**(Part II)**

The office of one Mr. Lancer was surprisingly big for a vice principal's/teacher's office. It had all the basic workings of an office - big desk, spinning chair for him, two hard chairs for his victims, metal file cabinets, computer, pictures of his hairy sister - but the fact that he had an array of T.V. screens broadcasting the security camera feeds from all over the school set up on one wall was a little unsettling. Over all the entire room felt entirely too cramped for the situation. Danny, Tucker, Mr. Lancer, and Dash, who was standing by the door, were the only people there, but somewhere in the building a meat monster was doing who-knows-what to one of his best friends. He should be off saving her, but instead he was metaphorically tied to his chair by the terrifying power that is his school file being read out loud.

Lancer was sifting through a file cabinet behind his desk before he found the ones he wanted and turned back to face Danny and Tucker, who were sitting in the 'victim' chairs. "Tucker Foley," he read in his patented 'nice guy' voice, "chronic tardiness, talking in class, repeated 'loitering' by the girls locker room." Tucker, sitting on Danny's right, openly smiled.

"Danny Fenton," Lancer went on and Danny blinked. "_Thirty-four_ dropped beakers in the last month, banned for life from handling all fragile school property," Dash smirked at that one and Danny knew he wanted to make some sort of comment about Danny handling himself but kept quiet in front of the teacher, "but no severe mischief before today. So, gentlemen, tell me." Lancer slammed their files on the table and leaned forward, shouting in his 'no more Mr. Nice Guy voice', "Why did the two of you _conspire_ to destroy the school cafeteria!"

First of all, Danny knew why he was being blamed for it, but why Tucker was too was completely out of his reach.

"Dash started it," Danny tried to defend himself. "He threw -"

"Not a single mud pie, according to a room full of eye-witness students," Mr. Lancer cut him off. "It is because of that fact that he is thereby exempted from scorn. You two, however, are not." Lancer stood up straight and began walking towards the door. "I have a cafeteria of students that I need to release for the day while the janitors clean up what is left of the cafeteria and the hallways you two _destroyed_, so I'll map out your punishment when I return. Mr. Baxter," he turned to Dash, who had already changed into his football warm ups and scrubbed (most of) the mud off of his face, "watch the door."

Dash threw one last smirk in their direction before pulling the door shut behind himself to keep watch from outside.

"...me into a table." Danny finished with a heavy sigh and sagged into his chair. The adrenaline rush from the fight with the Lunch Lady was slipping and his new head ache was ramping it up a notch. The 'milk' from the cafeteria floor had also soaked his pants was starting to smell.

"'Eye-witness students', yeah right," Tucker crossed his arms. "More like every kid the football team could threaten into not spilling the pre-chaos details. How can he get by like that on _everything_?"

"Because what he did throw," Danny said, resting his elbows on his knees and rubbing his temples, "were four touchdown passes in the last football game, and this school hasn't had a good football team in _years_. How else did a freshman like him get quarterback?"

"Dude," Tucker looked at Danny in confusion. "You pay attention to our football team?"

"No," Danny spat at the floor. "But reruns of the game on local T.V. are great to fall asleep to at one a.m. down in my parents lab, while I'm guarding that dumb portal." At the thought of night watch Danny let out a huge yawn. "How am I supposed to be able to do _anything_ tonight? How am I supposed to do anything _ever_? Just five minutes of trying to use my powers like that and I'm starting to run on empty. Even if we don't get suspended for the rest of the day, I don't think I could stay awake for two seconds in class. Then I'll just wind up here again..."

But Tucker wasn't entirely listening. "There's no way being good at football would keep him from getting in trouble, though. The school system's not that corrupt...right?"

Danny pointed to the wall of security feeds without looking at it. "Lancer spends all of his free time in here, Tuck." Which meant that Lancer had managed to see, even if he couldn't hear, most, if not all, of what happened before the garbage fight broke out and was unwilling to discipline his star player for fear of losing a game of football. Of course there was always the chance that he hadn't actually looked at the video footage yet and they could show him, but Danny wasn't putting his hopes on it.

"Anyway, we got to find Sam," Tucker protested, standing up. "For some reason, I feel like I got her kidnapped."

"Maybe because you told the ghost she changed the menu?" Danny looked up at him, unable to hide how irritated he was. "How about that?" Danny rubbed his eyes one last time and stood up. "You're right though, we've got to find her. Any idea where to start?"

Tucker sniffed the air several times. "That steak is still in the building. Two hundred yards, tops."

Danny thought for a moment before spotting the wall of monitors and walking over to it. From here he could see every hallway and the trails of mud that the kids were tracking through it as they worked their way around the decimated hallway toward the front exit. None of the halls looked remotely haunted, but then again, what did a haunting look like? Danny had never run into a ghost outside his parents lab before now.

Danny's attention was drawn to a screen when the shot fuzzed for a moment. It seemed to be a camera in a storage room since boxes were stacked in rows and it wasn't a part of the building he recognized. Danny's suspicions about his eye sight improving were only further boosted when he spotted a trail on the ground that was only a slightly lighter shade of gray than the rest of the floor. "Check it out," Danny pointed to the screen and Tucker peered at it through his thick-rimmed glasses. "Meat trail."

Tucker ruffled through some of the papers on the table below the wall of monitors. "Well, according to this key," Tucker lifted a sheet that Danny suspected listed the camera locations by the number on the screen, "and this map," Tucker whipped out his PDA from the thigh pocket on his pants and pulled up a map of the school, "that room is on the first floor, right below us."

"Perfect," Danny fisted his hands. If he was going to save Sam, he would need to be fast. If he was going to be fast, he would need to use his ghost powers.

If he was going to use his ghost powers, he would need to learn how not to pass out.

Grabbing Tucker's arm, Danny forced his body to change into his ghost half. When his clothes changed, he could feel the milk from his pants disappear only to be replaced by sticky meat juice and steak sauce from the earlier fight. Danny didn't even want to know what was dripping out of his hair. _Note to self, ghost body and human body need separate showers. That'll do wonders for the hot water bill._

Mentally filing that problem away for later, Danny put as much focus as he could into turning him and his friend intangible. Just like that, they started slipping through the floor and Danny had to use some of that super strength to keep Tucker from falling straight through the ceiling of the next room and dropping onto the ground.

Danny could just barely hear the door opening above them when the inside of the floor filled his vision. _Lancer is going to_kill_us_, he thought. _Can't worry about that now_, Danny shook his head. _Have to save Sam_.

"Sweet mother of mutton!" Tucker's gasp brought Danny's attention back enough to drop them the last few inches onto the floor.

They had landed just outside the back door to the basement storage room. The doorway was wide open and Danny could see by the meat trail across the ground lead straight through it. Walking inside, the room was dark - shards of light bulbs were scattered across the floor every few feet - and cold, but the first thing to hit Danny's senses was the overwhelming scent of raw, refrigerated, meat. _This must be the giant freezer where the school stores the food_. Looking around at the isles, Danny realized the room had to at least be the length of the gym. _We don't eat_that_much do we?_Danny raised and eyebrow and shook his head to no one in particular. "So much for the government trying to keep kids from getting fat."

"I dreamed of it, but I never thought I'd live to see it!" Meanwhile, Tucker had run over to a stack of meat boxes and did his very best to give it a hug. He spread both his arms wide across the face of the box and gave an inhale through his nose that would have made a professional tuba player proud.

"How is it that _I_ have the ghost powers and _you're_ the weird kid?"

"AHAHAHAHA," Danny and Tucker both snapped to attention at the sudden maniacal laughter that boomed just around the corner. Danny put a finger in front of his lips in the universal 'shh' symbol before turning and floating down the isle of boxes, inwardly wincing with every echo Tucker's boots made on the tile floor. Danny could recognize the Lunch Lady's 'sweet grandma' voice. "My dear child, meat is good for kids! It helps them grow and makes them smile! Why won't you eat it?"

"We don't _need_ meat, that's fact." Sam.

Danny peered around the corner of the next isle and spotted Sam through, literally, _through_, the Lunch Lady who had apparently dumped her entire meat monster costume on top of Sam. Danny could just make out Sam's head sticking out from a pile of meat. She seemed more of less OK, if not absolutely disgusted, but she was obviously struggling to get out and the Lunch Lady didn't look like she was about to go anywhere.

"Silence!" The ghost yelled and Danny caught sight of her teeth sharpening. "You need discipline, manners, _respect_!" The indoor wind suddenly kicked up again and started blowing in Sam's face. "You know where that comes from? MEAT!" Just like that she calmed again and held up two options: "Chicken or fish?"

"OK," Danny whispered and Turned to Tucker, "I'll take care of the ghost, you just find a way to get Sam out of that pile of meat."

Tucker held up a fork and a knife. "_Way_ ahead of you."

Danny raised an eyebrow. "Tucker..."

Tucker laughed, "No, seriously, I'll get her out."

Danny nodded warily, "Good."

Swallowing the lump in his throat, Danny pushed his feet off the ground and turned himself toward the Lunch Lady before shooting himself towards her, super hero style. She turned around just in time to watch Danny pull back a fist and throw it towards her face, knocking her all the way down the isle and into the wall. Danny wasn't sure what punching an actual old lady felt like, but he was pretty sure it didn't feel like that. It almost felt like punching that corn starch mixture they made in science class back in middle school. Well, maybe a little harder than that on the surface, but frankly Danny was just happy he had gloves on. He was also a little surprised at how far she flew. Sure, the other ghosts he'd fought didn't pay much attention to physics behind the transfer of force either, but for some reason he thought she'd be different.

The Lunch Lady fell to the ground with a thud and when Danny landed in front of her he did his best took threatening in the face of her red glare. Sadly, Spiderman poses were harder than they looked.

"I'll have you free in no time, Sam!"

"You've got to be kidding me."

Danny didn't need to turn around to know Tucker was about to eat Sam's way out of the meat pile. He sighed inwardly, _I'll take care of him later_.

The mean time, Danny decided to try pulling of some of those moves he saw in kung-fu movies that gravity would never let him do before. Jumping into the air, trying to match what he remembered, he did a somersault mid-air and came out of it with his foot thrust forward, ready to land a solid kick to the face. He actually felt pretty accomplished that he managed to pull that off until the Lunch Lady grabbed his ankle not two inches from it's target. Danny barely suppressed a shiver at the feeling of her hand. She was suddenly a lot more solid than she was when he had punched her, but the goopy feeling was still there.

She pushed herself back into the air and held a surprised Danny upside down by his foot. "Don't you see?" She began. Danny just blinked. "This is why you need meat! You're skin and bones!" With that she a mighty swing, the Lunch Lady proved that Danny also had no more need for physics any more either by chucking him down the outer isle head first. Danny tried to turn himself intangible but somehow only succeeded in lightly bouncing off the floor a few times before everything from the waist down fell through the wall, leaving his torso, arms, and head to stick out awkwardly.

Danny considered himself lucky he got out that just a little dizzy. He managed to pull himself out of the wall and up to his feet in time to see half a dozen shish-ke-babs flying towards his face. In pure panic, Danny tried to dodge up and to his right and let out a breath of relief when each kebab stuck themselves in the wall instead of his face, his chest, or his...legs.

Which he had somehow left on the floor. Apparently his waist had stretched out weaved itself between the projectiles, leaving his legs two feet to the left of the rest of him. It felt weird but..._this is kinda cool_! Danny smiled to himself.

But talk about an awkward growth spurt.

"ROOAHHH!" Danny's attention was turned back to his opponent as she let out another roar. The boxes of meat around her started shaking and glowing green before bursting open and hurling pounds and pounds of meat into the air. Danny reattached himself at watched curiously as all the meat, including the pile that had trapped Sam, gravitated toward the Lunch Lady and reformed an even bigger meat monster than the last.

An opening beneath it's glowing green eyes almost seemed to smile at him before it threw an arm forward...and forward, and forward. The arm extend all the way towards Danny too fast for him to dodge and it scooped him up in its giant, meaty hand. Danny pushed against the fingers - which he was having trouble defining from one another - but his costume was apparently doomed to be sticky today.

The Lunch Lady retracted her arm again so she could stare Danny in the face. Having her face right there, Danny felt his thumping heart jump into his throat and he tried not to hurl. Not like he had eaten anything since breakfast, but he was certain that Fruit Loops did _not_ taste better the second time.

"Help's on the way, buddy!" The Lunch Lady turned and Danny caught sight of Tucker standing next to Sam and holding his fork like a weapon. Before Danny could process it, he was being thrown again, this time towards his friends.

"Aargh!" Danny yelled. He closed his eyes and forced himself to turn intangible. He barely processed that the Lunch Lady had missed his friends and sent him, upside down, straight through another wall.

This time, however, Danny wasn't lucky enough to land half way through.

Just as Danny passed the bricks, he felt the tingle of intangibility disappear in time for his shoulder blades to smack directly across something metal and _hard_. He felt his feet start to tip forward and the rest of him slip down, but his toes hit a something in front of him and he crumbled into an awkward huddle on top of his head between a wall and a hard place. Which turned out to be another brick wall.

When Danny opened his eyes, he was greeted by a face full of wall and a nose full of kneecap. Normally if a person was crammed with the pipes - which must have been what his shoulders ran into - between two halves of a wall would be in pitch darkness, but Danny was finding the fact that his eyes were glowing green and the rest of him was letting off a white glow very convenient. He was just able to see the barbeque sauce stains on his normally white gloves.

Danny slowly managed to turn himself sideways until he was in more of a sitting position before reached his arm up, partially through the wall, to rub his shoulder. He daintily tapped where he knew a bruise would show up by tomorrow and tried to sort his thoughts out though the fog his tired brain was giving off. _Why am I still awake again?_

"Aaaah!" Danny's head jerked up at the sound of what he was now sure was his friends screaming.

_Ghost. Right._

A few yards down the wall to his right, Danny heard a noise that sounded like a pile of meat slamming into the double doors that led into the hallway that he was pretty sure was just beyond the wall behind him. It was then that he realized that he knew what falling piles of meat sounded like. Danny turned intangible again and pulled himself back through the wall. Once his head was through, though, the room started spinning he put a hand to his head to steady himself. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. _You got this, Fenton._

Danny looked up at another scream just as Sam and Tucker ran by his wall, away from the Lunch Lady/meat monster and the pile of steak that, sure enough, was blocking the doorway. At some point while he was in the wall, the Lunch Lady had traded her legs for a snake tail made out of sausage links.

Digging inside himself for the last reserves of strength he had, Danny pushed himself out of the wall and shot himself like a bullet down the isle between collapsing rows of boxes and after the Lunch Lady. Abandoning his own legs for tail, Danny was just barely able to over take her in time to come up between Sam and Tucker, hook his arms around their waists. Danny barely processed Tucker's hand latching onto the back of his shirt and Sam's surprised gasp as he lifted them off the floor and forced himself to phase them all through the wall just before they face planted into it. On the other side, Danny opened his eyes to the empty field behind the school. Letting out the breath he was holding, Danny staggered in mid-air, turning off the intangibility but still holding him and is friends several feet off the ground as they drifted forward, much slower now.

Danny turned his head toward the building. _She can't turn the meat intangible can she?_ He wondered this only for a few moments before deciding she couldn't and turning forward again. He felt his eye lids droop as his heart beat finally started slowing again. Was it a heart beat? They hadn't actually tried to find out if he actually had internal organs as a ghost. Maybe they should. Why was it important again?

"Gee, Danny," Danny jerked at the sudden noise of Sam talking. "Fighting meat monsters, flying through walls, you must be exhausted."

"What?" Danny shook his head, trying to focus on anything but the dark shadows around the edge of his vision. Should he be worried about that? "Of course not! What would..." Suddenly those black clouds looked really comfy. "Give you that idea..."

Danny was only vaguely aware of hitting the ground.

* * *

><p>Somewhere along the line (hewasn't sure when), Danny had become obsessed with outer space. Even if his dad never listened, he wasn't lying when he said he wanted to be an astronaut. Jazz told him over and over that only the best were selected to go into space, and those people were always smart and knew what they were doing. To get into the space program, Danny would have to get really good grades, get into a good college, and be a model student.<p>

That was before he got ghost powers though.

He still wasn't entirely sure how they worked, but until he figured it out, he would need to spend as much time getting reacquainted with the body he was already in the middle of getting reacquainted with during this mystic process called 'puberty'. What if his powers got in the way of puberty? What if something went wrong and his ghost form started growing tentacles that carried over into his human side in the form of extra arms and legs or some other new appendage that the government would confiscate in the form of arresting him and taking him to some sort of ghost version of the Men in Black? Then he would never go to space, he may never see the light of day again, and they may never let him have another run on sentence in his head because they'd zap him with their crazy little needle things that would prod him like a useless pile of meat-

**Meat**.

Danny snapped his eyes open.

It took all of two seconds to recognize the glow in the dark stars of his bedroom ceiling and spot Tucker, who was sitting in his spinning desk chair."Wh-what's going on?"

Tucker stopped spinning when Danny spoke. "You passed out," he said, somehow rolling the chair across the carpet to his bedside. "We took you home." Danny noticed Sam walk over from where she had been leaning against the wall. "You've been asleep for _four days_."

Danny shot up to a sitting position and jerked his attention back to Tucker. "_Four days?_"

"Haha, nah," Tucker smiled and leaned back in the chair. "It's only been a couple hours."

"Knock it off, Tucker," Sam thumped him over the back of the head. "This is the second time today your carelessness almost got him killed."

"_Me_?" Tucker stood up. "_I_ almost got him killed?" Danny laid back down. He felt like he woke up in the middle of something. "The only reason this happened was because _you_ had to be unique! You had to take the meat away, and _I'm_ going to get it back!" Tucker took the opportunity to storm out of the door and down the hallway.

"You want to change that menu back," Sam stormed after him, "you're going to have to go though _me_ to do it!" Sam grabbed the door and slammed it shut behind her.

Danny just laid there awkwardly for a moment, still rather confused. "Ah, well," he muttered to himself. "I'm sure everything'll be back to normal by tomorrow."

"Ouch - dang it...crud!" Danny sat up at the sound of Jazz's voice from across the hall. "Stupid-! Argh!"

Danny swung himself off his bed and followed the sound of muttered curses out his door, across the hall, and into his sister's room. "Jazz?"

Jazz was sitting on her bed with the ends of her hair sucked into...a vacuum cleaner? Looking at it again, Danny noticed the green gauges and knobs on the body of the machine that marked his parents experimental handiwork with 'ectoplasmic energies that will one day revolutionize technology'...should they actually get it working.

Jazz dropped her hands into her lap with a frustrated huff and looked up at her brother. "Hey, Danny. Think you could help me out here?"

"What happened?" Danny cautiously stepped closer to Jazz, still not certain the vacuum thing wouldn't explode.

"Mom and Dad jumped me when I walked in the door." Danny raised his eyebrows. He was a little shocked but not quite surprised. "Yeah, I know. Smoke screen and everything, too," Jazz returned to making gentler attempts to pull her hair back to freedom, all the while talking as if it had been unusually windy today, not that the man and women who gave birth to her and tackled her for walking in the doorway. "Apparently Dad is convinced we have a ghost in the family." Danny felt his stomach drop into his feet and found he was suddenly incapable of coherent thought under 113 thoughts per second, most of which included something along the lines of 'Did they find out?', 'What gave it away?', 'This is not how it was supposed to happen,' and 'I am so dead.'

All thought actually stopped when he reached that last one, though, as it was the moment he realized such metaphors were no longer useable.

_Play dumb, Fenton_. "W-what?" Danny tried to smile but he could feel his face being unwilling to cooperate. "That's ridiculous!" He was pretty sure his voice just cracked but there was something thumping in his ears that was making it very hard to hear.

Luckily, Jazz was still looking down at her hair and she just scoffed. "I know, right? I mean, ghosts are supposed to be dead people, aren't they? Last I checked we were all alive and breathing and it's not like someone could be...I don't know, half dead?" Jazz shook her head, still smiling. "I'd like to know how that would work."

_Join the club_, Danny thought bitterly to himself. From what he could tell, his parents didn't actually know anything and Jazz was still as disbelieving as ever on the existence of anything paranormal. Danny let his shoulders relax and he tried to hide a huge sigh of relief by kneeling down next to the vacuum cleaner. "So how's this thing supposed to work, anyway?"

"Well _supposedly_, it's power source is charged by 'ectoplasmic energy' that they suck out of the portal downstairs."

"I thought that didn't actually work?" Danny asked, scanning the bottomed-out energy gauges. "Something about it losing charge after it passes through?"

Jazz gave an irritated sigh and shook her head. "Of course it doesn't work! I don't know what that monstrosity is, but a portal to another dimension? I'll believe it when I see it but until the day our parents reach that level of stupidity to actually try walking through that thing, who am I to ruin their delusions?"

Danny just smiled and started playing with the knobs and switches while Jazz kept talking, trying to see if something would start. He was flicking the 'suck/reverse' switch back and forth when something occurred to him. If Jazz's hair was stuck in the vacuum, then it was turned to 'suck'...and it had turned on. Danny flicked it to 'reverse' again and started running his finger over the gauges. All of them read as empty. Another thing was strange, he'd never seen the thing before but it somehow seemed familiar. Something about the pattern the dials were laid out in reminded him of Cheerios...

Then it hit him. Danny had been staring at the blueprints just a few days ago during breakfast. It was the day he'd spilled the box of Cheerios all over the table after his dad hit a bad bruise on his shoulder that hadn't quite healed yet. He'd had to clean up every Cheerio and ended up not having time to finish his breakfast was hungry the rest of the morning. His stomach growled through the entire math test...

Danny shook his head, focusing back on the problem. He nodded a few times for Jazz's benefit and made a noise like he was agreeing with her before she could call him out on not listening. Danny tried to remember as much of the blue prints as he could and eventually found his way inside a panel on the left side. In the middle of a cluster of wires on the inside was an circuit board that was a toxic shade of green. Maybe that was the power source?

Danny poked it with one finger, not expecting it to do anything but wondering how to get it working. When he touched it though, it started glowing. Danny retracted his finger and shut the panel as quickly as possible when the whole machine started making an ominous whirring noise.

Danny's eyes went wide when the energy gauges suddenly shot up to full. "Danny, what did you-" Jazz's question was cut off when her hair was suddenly blown into her face. She shrieked in surprise and Danny scrambled to press the off button. There was a moment of silence where the two of them just looked at each others wide eyed expressions. "What did you...?" Danny just shrugged.

Danny sat back on his heels for a moment before standing up. "Well I'd better...um...go do my homework for school tomorrow." Danny cleared his throat awkwardly before walking out of the room, back across the hall and shutting his door behind him. Leaning his back against the door, Danny looked down at his hand. The moment he touched that chip, the vacuum started working.

_Did_I_do that?_He guessed that would make some sense. If it was supposed to run off of energy from the Ghost Zone, and Danny's powers used the same energy then maybe...

Danny's alarm clock across the room beeped as it changed to six o'clock. Great, time to endure another dinner conversation with his family about ghosts. If he was lucky they would talk about the new lethal weapon designs today instead of dissection plans. Danny looked back at his hand, very happy it was still attached to the rest of him.

Maybe he'd ask Tucker tomorrow.

* * *

><p>Or maybe his friends would be busy on the front lawn of the school protesting eating habits. That could happen too.<p>

Danny had spent his walk to school wondering where exactly his dysfunctional friends had gotten too, but after arriving on the street in front of what was supposed to be a calm, happy, establishment of learning, Danny decided 'dysfunctional friends' didn't quite capture it.

To his left was what one might describe as a Meat Convention. There was a huge crowd full of what Danny was pretty sure were meat enthusiasts all either carrying signs reading things like 'EAT MEAT', 'MEAT is NEAT', 'WE 3 MEAT', or 'MEAT GIVES YOU A BUTT' , holding balloons shaped like t-bone steaks and turkey legs, or dressed up in steak and hotdog costumes. Some stood in line at a barbeque or waited around a fire for a pig to finish cooking under a 'UNITED WE EAT MEAT!' banner while others bought meat on a stick and took pictures with the giant dairy cow balloon or the six foot big mac. Danny spotted what he assumed to be most of his classmates by a stage set up near the back where the National Meat Society's 'The Weinerettes' (four girls in wiener costumes) were waving and dancing off stage. Danny wasn't totally surprised when Tucker walked on stage with a microphone and started giving a speech about out constitutional right to eat meat. Danny was more than a little shell shocked at this point though, so all he really remembered about it was Tucker yelling, "What do we want?" and the crowd actually responding.

"MEAT!"

"When do we want it?" he asked.

"NOW!"

Danny looked from the chaos on his right to his left where he found...hippies. There was a group of hippies sitting around an brightly painted Volkswagen bus that was parked under an apple tree. They were all dancing to a tambourine, hugging each other, and selling fruit to little girls while not ten feet away was a group of hippie and goth protesters holding signs reading things like 'IT'S EASY BEING GREEN!', and some that seemed to be in the wrong place because they read things like 'GIVE PEACE A CHANCE'. But Danny figured the hippies were probably all stoned so he could let that go.

The protesters were all crowded around a Casper High school bus where Danny spotted Sam standing on the roof over an 'Ultra Recyclo Vegetarian' banner and leading the chant of "Veggies now! Veggies forever!"

Danny just stood on the sidewalk in defeat when Sam spotted him. He watched as she leaped from the bus and the crowd caught her while continuing the chant. Danny's gaze wandered to the empty school building. He knew the entire building must be empty. He found most of the students among the meat crowd, but he did spot Nathan Lester standing next to a hippie. As he stood there he counted at least four teachers trying to round kids up and usher them into the building with threats of detention. Danny shifted his backpack onto both shoulders and wondered if maybe they'd cancel school today.

Danny snapped out of his daze when both Sam and Tucker entered his line of sight. They were both only feet from Danny before noticing each other and now they resorted to glaring at each other, as if daring the other to come any closer.

Danny took a moment to realize that for once he was not the only one wearing the exact same clothes as yesterday. "You guys put together two protests in one night?"

"Meat eaters, Danny. Always ready to fight, and our high protein diets give us the energy we need to do it quickly." Tucker said this as it was the most and only true statement the world ever really cared about. "Not to mention half the school is on my side."

"Ultra Recyclo Vegetarians are always ready to protest, and because we don't have to waste time _cooking_ our food, we can move even faster." Sam smirked. "A killer twitter following does come in handy, though."

Danny looked back and forth between them. "Don't you guys think this is a _little_ extreme?"

"No choice, buddy." Danny turned to Tucker. "Either you're with me-"

"Or you're against _him_!"

"_So who's side are you on_?"

Danny didn't even have to think up a response before a gale force wind came out of nowhere. When he looked up, there were papers, signs, and meat balloons flying all over the place. What sounded like the cackle of an old witch filled the air and a chill ran straight up Danny's spine and out his mouth in a puff of cold air that flew right into his face in the wind. Danny, Sam, and Tucker glanced at each other. "We forgot about the ghost, didn't we?" Danny shouted over the wind and the growing screams of the other kids.

The cackle shifted in a roar and next thing Danny knew, a truck by the meat convention burst at the seams. Apparently the protest was ready to last all week if it had to because the amount of meat that flew out of that truck could have fed a small militia for days.

Danny and the other kids watched as several thousand pounds of dead animal formed together into yesterday's meat monster. Glowing eyes glaring and arms crossed, this new beast was easily four times the size of the old one.

When the wind stopped, the beast leaned over and roared, "IT'S LUNCH TIME!"

The yard fell into chaos.

People ran tossed their signs and abandoned their stands to run screaming in the other direction. Sam and Tucker stood by Danny in the middle of it all. "Meat!" Tucker actually looked close to tears. "Why have you betrayed me?"

Danny knew exactly what the monster was looking for. Yesterday it was angry at Sam, but today it wanted a fight with the guy who beat her up and got away with it. Danny was more than happy to oblige, but he needed cover, fast.

"Guys, time to make up," Danny looked from the crowd of people to his friends. "Now!"

When they didn't quite seem to be getting it at first, Danny rolled his eyes and mumbled, "Good grief," under his breath before pulling his friends around him into a group hug. When they still didn't get it he looked them both straight in the face with glowing green eyes, jerked his head in the direction of the crowd and told them, "Cover me."

That made it click. Sam and Tucker both wrapped their arms around him, blocking him from view, then closed their eyes against the light of Danny transforming. Once they let go and backed away, Danny Phantom gave himself a running start and shot into the air.

* * *

><p>After the fight was over and everyone went home for the second cancelled school day in a row, Jazz told Danny an interesting story.<p>

Apparently, during the chaos that was happening on the front lawn, Jazz was having a 'session' with a goth-punk called Spike. Right when Spike "was about to make his breakthrough," their parents had heroically leaped out of the bushes "howling like the crazed maniacs they are" and proceeded to catch Jazz in a glowing green net. Jazz didn't quite catch the name, but the name of the contraption they were reeling her in with something with the word Fenton in front of it.

Not surprisingly, to Danny anyway, Jack was still quite convinced that Jazz was somehow a ghost. However after an obvious display of not-ghost-ness, and a good long speech that Jazz quoted word for word to Danny but he wasn't really listening, their Dad had proceeded to try to suck her into the Fenton Thermos. Of course it didn't work because all of their inventions that actually required power always ended in either hair loss or pathetic whining noises and sparks, but it was the action itself that did all the talking.

The following conversation wasn't so much of a conversation as it was a "heartfelt stare down" in which Jazz basically channeled every negative feeling she had ever felt about their parents into her eyes and shot them at her father like laser beams. According to Jazz there was some sort of psychological reason why this actually managed to work, but Danny was really getting bored with the entire conversation by this point so all he really heard was the part where Jazz told him that Jack had metaphorically "turned his back on ghosts." He even turned around for dramatic effect.

This was something Danny had been shocked to hear and apparently Jazz and Maddie had felt the same way. Danny had tried to ask how their dad was fairing now but Jazz just shushed him and said to let her finish. Anyway, Jack had felt so disheartened about the whole ghost thing, he chucked the thermos over his shoulder, but he turned out to have more muscle than they thought because the thing must have flown forty feet in the air. Just as Jazz was about to feel so proud that her dad was embracing the world of things that actually exist, something that looked akin to a white haired kid had fallen past them at break-neck speeds shouting, "Thanks for the thermos!" before disappearing into the ground.

Danny didn't even need to keep listening at this point. He would have had trouble even trying to listen anyway because he was trying to hide his face behind his dinner. Everything beyond that he either knew or could guess anyway. Their dad was back into ghosts and both his parents had been devastated when they ran to find the actual ghost only to discover they'd missed it by barely three minutes.

Danny almost wished he could tell his side of the story.

* * *

><p>So the newest meat monster wasn't just four times the size of the old one, it was also four times and freak-out worthy. Sure, a monster made out of steaks may sound funny and delicious, but Danny was sure he'd have nightmares about this one for weeks.<p>

When he'd initially pushed off the ground, Danny was feeling pretty confident. He'd made it out yesterday, right? How much harder could this be? Size isn't everything. Of course this time getting away wasn't going to be good enough. Should they find no other way, they were probably going to have to find out how to kill a ghost. Though Danny wasn't even entirely convinced that these things were really 'ghosts' in the traditional sense. None of them, up till now anyway, had even remotely resembled someone who had died then kept on truckin', just goo-y, green, ectoplasm monsters from another dimension. One of which, Danny was getting ready to fight head on with, even though it must have been ten times taller than him.

Needless to say, once he reached eye-level, that confidence meant pretty much nothing.

The monster pulled back a fist and swung it straight toward Danny, but, with ease he didn't know he had, Danny flew himself over it and the fist swung straight past him with several yards of lee-way. It swung again and again but Danny just bounced around it's head like a fly. It may be bigger, but the speed it had yesterday was gone. Maybe it was the size, maybe a ghost being out of the Ghost Zone this long had unexpected side effects, but either way Danny was finding his own speed to be quite a source of confidence. Zipping around the back, Danny landed a kick to the back of it's head, knocking sloppy joes and shish-kebabs down to the ground.

Surprisingly enough, Danny had somehow managed to land a hit to the ghost inside the suit because he managed to off-balance the entire thing and it face planted into the dirt. He flinched at the thud that seemed to echo in his ears as it hit the ground. Then he heard Tucker's voice from the ground, "He really is getting better." Danny jerked his head around to where Tucker was standing next to Sam in the otherwise-empty yard. Had he really just heard that? _Wait...he said I was getting better._ Danny smiled. _Ha. I knew I didn't really suck._ That, and apparently ghost powers included hawk-like hearing.

That had him feeling good until he turned right into a meet fist to the face. Danny was pretty disoriented at the time, but he was pretty sure he flew right through and airplane and back. On the way down, though he managed to straighten out enough to let gravity help him land a direct hit, sending meat flying everywhere. He was pretty sure he actually blacked out for a minute because next thing he knew he was in the middle of a crater with his face on a pillow of sausage and feeling sore everywhere.

Danny tried to get up but felt something pull painfully in his left shoulder. With a groan and more than a few stumbles he managed to wade through the meat pool and pull himself up out of the crater that turned out to be a good six feet deep.

As he was pulling himself up over the lip of the crater something floated up. "Dear, what a mess," Danny looked up into the face of the Lunch Lady, green and meat free. He briefly wondered if that was a good thing. "Are you okay?" She asked sweetly.

"Yeah," Danny pulled himself to his feet and stretched out his shoulder. Accelerated healing could probably be added to the list. "I think so."

"Tough," The Lunch Lady's face went blood thirsty again and she growled, "because you being okay is not part of my balanced diet of DOOM."

From behind him, meat flew out of the crater and surrounded him. In moments they had formed five smaller meat monsters, each only a bit smaller than him. Danny looked at their stubby legs. I wonder how far those can take them, he wondered to himself, taking a defensive stance. Or how high.

Danny leapt into the air, dismayed only a moment later when all five of them followed. Okay plan B. Danny swung out with the heel of his foot and managed to slice them all in one shot with a 360 kick. They all broke apart surprisingly easy and Danny let himself drop to the ground again but the scattered meat just sprung back together into even angrier mini-meat monsters.

"Wasn't expecting that," Danny felt a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach – this could take a while – but that feeling somehow quickly escalated into a bright flash of light one of the world's fastest changes of clothes. Danny looked down at his bare hands. "Or that."

The monsters jumped towards him and lifted him, upside down, into the air. In a matter of moments Danny was hanging from his jeans while the little devils flew him to the back side of the building. Then, all of a sudden, something hit him in the face and landed in his hands."

"The Fenton Thermos!" Danny blinked against the bruise forming on his cheek but smiled at his luck. With this he could…wait. "But how am I going to get it to work?"

The monsters above him started cackling before they let him go and suddenly he was falling.

"Chang back," he told himself, digging for that little spark that never quite left him after that day in the lab. It was weak but he finally found it. "Change back!"

There were a few blinking flashes and Danny felt his body temperature drop again before quickly turning himself intangible to pass safely through the ground, right at his parents' feet.

"Thanks for the Thermos!"

* * *

><p>Danny had an idea. It was a crazy idea, probably a very stupid one, too, but it could work.<p>

Navigating through the ground was trickier than it looked. In the end, Danny discovered just how convenient his hearing was by finding the sound of peoples footsteps and moving in the opposite direction. Sure enough, Danny flew himself up out of the ground back in the front court yard, less than twenty yards away from the Lunch Lady.

When she spotted him, her eyes went straight to the thermos in his hands. "No! Soup's not on today's menu!" Figures that's what she'd be worried about.

"I'm changing the menu!" he told her, figuring he might as well hit it where it hurts. "Permanently!"

"Please work!" Danny uncapped the thermos, thinking back to the vacuum incident with Jazz. If Danny was right, somehow he was giving off energy as a ghost – the same kind of energy Fenton equipment was designed to function off of. It never worked when pulled directly from the portal, but for some reason it had worked when coming from an actual ghost, i.e. Danny. Maybe if he could channel enough power into the Thermos… _I hope I'm right!_

Danny focused all of his energy straight into the Thermos and, sure enough, a light kicked on and it started making a high pitched whirring sound. Danny took aim toward the Lunch Lady and fired. A bright beam of light shot from the end of the Thermos and wrapped around the ghost like a net. She tried to pull free but the light wouldn't let her go and soon she was being sucked toward the Thermos. She let out one final screech before being shrunk and sucked inside.

Danny placed the cap back on with gloveless hands. Powering the Thermos had taken the last of his energy out of him and his feet had hit the ground at some point before the Lunch Lady was even gone.

He let out an exhausted sigh. She wasn't gone for good, he reminded himself. They could put her back in the ghost zone or lock her up somewhere, but she'd eventually get out again. Back to wreak havoc on vegetarians everywhere.

Speaking of vegetarians.

"What happened?" Danny turned to find Sam and Tucker crawling their way out from underneath the deflated utter of the giant cow. "Where's the ghost?" She asked.

Danny helped her to her feet and held up the Fenton Thermos, smiling. "My parents have their moments."

"GHOST DIRECTLY AHEAD." Danny and Sam both turned at the monotone voice. "YOU WOULD HAVE TO BE SOME SORT OF MORON TO NOT NOTICE THE GHOST DIRECTLY AHEAD."

Sure enough, Danny's parents, staring at the Fenton Finder that no doubt pointed directly at him. Danny smiled when they looked up at him and pointed over his shoulder with his thumb. "Oh, sorry Dad. You just missed him."

"We got a runner!" Mr. Fenton shouted and both his parents ran off in the direction Danny pointed.

"Great," Danny spotted Jazz walking down the sidewalk, mumbling to herself and no doubt on the way back to her car. "Back to square one."

Tucker was looking after Danny's parents. "So you're not going to tell them?" he asked.

Danny let himself smile. "I think I may have finally figured out what these powers are for," he told them, shrugging. "They make me-"

He was interrupted by a large hand on his shoulder and he looked up into the face of a very angry-looking teacher.

"In a world of trouble."

* * *

><p>"Manson! Pick up that t-bone!" Lancer shouted through his megaphone.<p>

"With my hands?" Sam picked it up off the ground between two fingers.

"Foley! Pick up that turf-which!"

"With my hands?" He groaned picking it up daintily before tossing it into his trash bag.

Mr. Lancer took a large bite out of a turkey leg before finally walking away and not coming back.

Mr. Lancer had blamed Sam and Tucker whole heartedly for the entire fiasco. Apparently he was still in the building while the ghost was rampaging and not one person was willing to admit they'd seen a giant meat monster. That left Sam, Tucker, and by association Danny, to clean up the mess. They spent the entire day under the intense watch of Lancer and they had finally made it to the last chunk of school still covered in a meaty mess. Danny was sweeping the concrete with a broom which would probably join the meat in the already packed dumpster once this was over. The bristles were clumped together and there would be no getting the stench off of it.

With Lancer around keeping an eye on them and Dash around to lean against the dumpster and laugh, Danny never got to finish his conversation with Sam and Tucker. He knew what he was going to say, though, and he figured that was the important part.

These powers made him capable. His whole life, Danny hadn't felt truly capable of being or doing anything on his own. Jazz or his parents would always jump 'to the rescue' to help the baby brother of the family. He wasn't the best at school and he didn't really have any talents.

But with these powers he could be somebody. Not because someone was helping him, but because he was doing it himself. If he told his parents, they would take that away; they would defend their 'precious baby boy' and do everything for him, but if he wanted to really figure out how to use his powers and to help people, then he'd have to do this himself.

Well, not completely by himself. Danny let himself smile as Sam threw the t-bone directly into Tucker's face.

He had friends for that.

Danny pushed a smashed lump of what used to be several burger patties into his main pile when he heard Dash laughing. Danny stepped around the corner of the dumpster that Dash was leaning against and laid a hand on the side. He felt his hand tingle and an invisible energy connect him to the dumpster that promptly turned intangible and dumped several tons of meat onto Dash, practically burying him.

"Fenton!" Dash shook some of it off his head. "A little help?"

"Whatever you say Dash," Danny grinned. "Whatever you say."

Until tomorrow. Danny was pretty sure there was a stack of toilet paper back home with Dash's locker number on it.

* * *

><p><strong>Date Posted: November 12, 2012<strong>

**Word Count: 9,052**


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